Magda Maaoui, PhD
housing + environmental health.
Asst. Professor of urban planning @gsd.harvard.edu
Co-lead healthy places design lab
Formerly OECD, Paris planning, Ad’A
www.magdamaaoui.com
currently working on hospitals x housing, any lead/personal story welcome
- Last year, I gave a guest lecture at the London School of Economics about my research at the nexus of housing and health. Immense thank you to colleagues in the sociology department Giulia Torino and David Madden for such a warm welcome.Excited to be sharing this published conceptual paper soon.
- I treated this as an opportunity to get generous feedback on the ways I’m conceptualizing years of community engagement, written planning reports, and frankly speaking monster volumes of data and fieldwork materials I love with all my heart.
- For colleagues still tweaking their syllabi for the semester, here's a book recommendation from me: I recently reviewed Cole Stangler Stangler's Paris Is Not Dead: Surviving Gentrification in the City of Light, for the Journal of Planning Education and Research: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
- highlights: "The author is not an urban planner. He’s a journalist, based in France, who covers labor and politics. And yet, the rigorous reporting he does for this book works as a reminder of the type of fine-grain fieldwork planners should do when they write about any given city."
- It’s precise, entertaining, moving even, as if we were standing right in that melting pot, with him and the métro singer whose repertoire ranges “from the high drama of Algerian raï to a deftly arranged Arabic language cover of Billie Jean” (34).
- It shifts the narrative and corrects the myopia that still prevails in so many books about Paris. And while I would've loved to read more about the complex housing politics in the suburbs of the Grand Paris, I found the dissection of challenges faced by renters pretty convincing.
- À la veille des élections municipales 2026 en France, heureuse d’avoir co-signé cette tribune dans Le Monde, en tant que membre du collectif Tous Grands Parisiens www.lemonde.fr/idees/articl...
